provide abundance of shipping accommodation, besides what is afforded by the river itself; and now the river flows between the steep banks of North and South Shields.  As the names declare, these two growing and prosperous towns once consisted of a few fishermen’s huts, or “shielings”; but that was long ago, when the north shore of the Tyne was owned by the Prior of Tynemouth, and the southern shore by the Bishop of Durham, and the citizens of Newcastle complained to King Edward I. that these two ecclesiastics had raised towns, “where no town ought to be,” and that “fishermen sold fish there which ought to be sold at Newcastle, to the great injury of the whole borough, and in detriment to the tolls of our Lord the King.”  These quarrels between Newcastle and the other settlements on the Tyne continued with varying results, until in the days of Cromwell, Ralph Gardiner of Chirton, a little village close to North Shields, took up the cudgels for the growing towns; and by dint of great perseverance, and in spite of much persecution and ill-will, succeeded in getting most of the unjust privileges of their stronger neighbour abolished.

There were salt-pans, too, on both sides of the mouth of the Tyne, which were worked in connection with the monasteries from very early days; and Daniel Defoe, when he visited the north in 1726, declared that he could see from the top of the Cheviot “the smoke of the salt-pans at Sheals, at the mouth of the Tyne, which was about forty miles south of this.”

North Shields clings haphazard to the steep bank of the Tyne, and spreads away up and beyond it, reaching out towards Wallsend on the river shore and Tynemouth along by the sea, the older parts by the river looking black and grimy to the last degree; but there is a silver lining to this very black cloud—­not visible, it is true, but distinctly audible—­in the great shipbuilding and repairing works known as Smith’s Dock, one of the largest concerns of the kind in Great Britain, where so many hundreds of men earn their daily bread; and in the fishing industry, which was the foundation of the town’s prosperity, and bids fair to be so for many years to come, as it is increasing year by year.  The Fish Quay at North Shields is a sight worth seeing; and, in the herring season, it is increasingly frequented by Continental buyers.

The fortunes of South Shields and Jarrow, though these towns are not in Northumberland, are yet so bound up with the story of the Tyne that no one would ever think of that river without them.  Especially is this the case with Jarrow, which “Palmer’s” has raised from a small colliery village to a large and flourishing town.  In those famous yards, everything that is necessary for the building of the largest ironclad, from the first smelting of the ore until the last rivet is in place, can be done.  All Northumbria—­Northumbria in the ancient and widest sense of the word—­owes a debt of gratitude to Jarrow, for was it not the home of